Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Semantic Web refers to making the information available on the World Wide Web understandable to machines. Instead of a user processing and manipulating information on the World Wide Web, a personal agent on a computer would exploit the data for the user to perform a task, such as answering a Boolean query. However, there exits many knowledge bases on the World Wide Web and merging them quickly leads to inconsistencies.
Generally there are two methods to deal with inconsistencies in knowledge bases. The first method is to repair the inconsistent knowledge bases. However, it may be ineffective or even impossible to repair inconsistencies as the inconsistent knowledge bases may be too large or one may not have the right to repair the inconsistencies. Furthermore, the inconsistent knowledge bases may change at high frequency and therefore not allow for any meaningful repair. The second method to deal with inconsistent knowledge bases is to directly perform reasoning with the inconsistent knowledge bases. There are several works on reasoning with inconsistency. Given a Boolean query, these reasoning methods usually return “yes,” “no,” or “I don't know.”